THE ANTI-POSITIVIST ORIENTATION OF UKRAINIAN PHILOSOPHICAL AND LEGAL THOUGHT OF THE LATE 19th AND EARLY 20th CENTURIES

INTRODUCTION The contemporary history of the meta-European community is largely conditioned by technocratic, rational-centric thinking, formed in the era of scientific revolutions, intense industrial development, the creation of largescale social projects, etc. As S. Prolieev points out, “it was a world of powerful mobilizations of different types – purposeful and rapid concentration of resources, practices, institutions, people and awareness on the implementation of large-scale socio-economic and socio-political projects and programs. Utopias were the most grandiose projects of the twentieth century, followed by the social state of prosperity project” 1 . Positivism as a specific method of cognition would not have been possible without a Western European mentality, a rationalist tradition that originated in ancient culture, and the socio-cultural realities of the Western European goal of the modern-day ethnos. Positivism appeals to a subject-sensory experience, but it is a form of Western European rationalism, which has taken extreme forms, become a self-contained and a singular rationalism. The modern era believed in the omnipotence of the mind, in the ability of qualitative improvement of humanity by the means of rational thinking, believed in social engineering, which had to end with the mass enlightenment of everybody. V. Soloviov, “The meaning of all historical development of mankind, according to positivism, is that positive knowledge and life forms, which are based on it, have to finally replace and destroy the theological and philosophical, or metaphysical” 2 . That is, positivism is rationalism, purified from a worldview, value, subjective dimension, it is cold, sober, indifferent to humanistic content, self-assured mind. It was fused with a culture of quantity, which in the 19 th century in Western Europe was intensively formed by people infected with the bourgeois virus, practical people, with the psychology of free entrepreneurism and business initiative. These were representatives of the